This reminded me to an exchange reported on Reddit, there was one poster who adamantly approved of the idea of person hood starting at conception, the reply came “here is a thought experiment: in an in vitro fertilization clinic room there a canister with dozens of frozen fertilized eggs and a small kid, the building is on fire and you can carry only the kid or the canister. What would carry out?”
The answer from the one talking about the person-hood idea was:
“F*** you!”
There are a lot of anti-choice apologists now repeating some flavor of this: if the pregnancy would result in something horrible like a child being forced to give birth, or the death of the mother, then it is “not an abortion”.
This is a lie. The law does not redefine this as “not an abortion.” Medical texts don’t redefine this as “not an abortion.”
These people are willfully and purposely lying because they know it looks horrible to deny an abortion to a dying woman or a healthy 10-year-old. That’s exactly what they want, but they want to confuse prospective voters as to what they’re doing.
These laws aren’t passed by pro-lifers. They’re passed by anti-choicers. They’re not the same thing. Anti-choicers would be just as happy passing laws mandating abortion as prohibiting it, if that were what was politically feasible.
Yeah, but you’d have to convince them to codify that restrictive definition of abortion into law, and as has been discussed at length in this thread the vagueness of the anti-abortion laws is seen as a feature rather than a bug by the pro-lifers. I think they’re afraid that if they doctors are allowed to use their judgement to determine when abortions are necessary for the health of the mother, that some doctors will use that leeway to provide abortions willy-nilly. Or if the drugs used to induce abortions are explicitly allowed to be prescribed for other conditions, that doctors will use that as an excuse to prescribe them to pregnant women.
I’m sure they’ll be horrified when their own daughters or sisters or wives need to abort an ectopic pregnancy or similar and are unable to receive appropriate medical care. And they’ll probably blame those horrible liberal abortionists for forcing them to write such restrictive laws, or possibly turn it into a conspiracy by abortionist doctors to deny appropriate care out of spite.
Note as well that there are two requirements to meet Foster’s definition: rape, plus threatening her life. Nothing about rape by itself, or life-threatening by itself.
Gotta get the twofer for it not to be an abortion, it sounds like.
I was picturing an absurd future where, to escape the worst of the backlash, they actually codify these exceptions by making up a new term for “abortion-but-not-really-abortion.”
In reality, of course, they’ll express thoughts and prayers and do jack shit.
It’s more accurate if you take out “willy-nilly.”
You need to ask yourself this, though: why does someone have such strong beliefs about the obscure topic of when life begins? What is important to them that they need to set it so rigidly, and why do these rigid-minded thinkers invariably place it at conception, rather than birth or quickening or some other milestone?
If you dig into the answer that question, you’ll get to the real motive, which is that they don’t think women should have sex outside of their moral judgment, and they feel that pregnancy should be the punishment for that. In other worse - ritualized misogyny.
Darn it, correcting a bit:
This reminded me to an exchange reported in Reddit, there was one poster who adamantly approved of the idea of person hood starting at conception, the reply came:
“Here is a thought experiment: in an in-vitro fertilization clinic room there is a canister with dozens of frozen fertilized eggs and a small kid, the building is on fire and you can carry only the kid or the canister. What would you carry out?”
The answer from the one talking about the person-hood idea was:
“F*** you!”
The really horrific thing about the whole “threat to the life of the mother” unstead of “health of the mother” is it means letting the pregnancy go longer, which makes the abortion more traumatic, more risky, and arguably less ethical. The “wait and see” is really “wait to kill”. So like, a 10 year okd is pregnant. If the law requires waiting until you actually can demonstrate that her life, not just her health, is threatened, that may be a very late term abortion. So she gets to live through a tramatic pregnancy for weeks or months, and then undergo a surgical abortion, possibly after quickening. By then, she may have decided she doesn’t want an abortion (because she is a baby herself! Not logical) so you have to convince or force a child to do this to save her life.
Or pre-eclampsia. Usually it starts at like 32 weeks and you can deliver the baby and it has a chance. Sometimea it starts at 28 weeks and you play a dangerous game of chicken trying to decide how long you can wait, to give the baby as much time as possible. But sometimes it starts at 18 or 20 weeks. If you have pre-eclampsia at 20 weeks, you are almost certainly going to die of a stroke before the baby is viable. Often you have an abortion almost immediately because it is dangerous and doing untold damage to your whole circulatory system. But now I guess we will just let moms sit in the hospital for 4 weeks until they are literally about to stroke out, and then perform an abortion that is so much more traumatic.
I can’t even.
I would question the constitutionality of this. The Sixth Amendment says that a defendant must be tried in the location where the crime occurred. Now, a Houston doctor would no doubt be prosecuted in Houston itself, but if the prosecution team is not from Houston, that would seem to violate the constitution - after all, juries must be chosen from the district where the crime occurred, so I do not see why prosecutors shouldn’t be also.
The Sixth Amendment says that a defendant shall be tried in the “district” in which the crime occurred “which district shall have been previously ascertained by law.” There would be no problem with the state legislature breaking Texas up into three or four prosecutorial districts so that Austin is lumped in with Abilene and Dallas with Dalhart.
So they’re all misogynistic nutjobs?
But it is not conscious?
I kinda have to laugh at the mental gymnastics necessary to not label them what they are.
Are you sure? I don’t see any reference to the trial being in the location where the crime occurred; rather that the jury must be drawn from the state and district (vicinage). That clause has not been held to be incorporated under the 14th Amendment, so how would it apply to a state trial for a state crime?
See Wikipedia:
The situation is strongly reminding me of pre-Civil War slavery debates. The pro-slavery camp evolved an exaggerated and distorted view of property rights that is similar to the “pro-life” camp’s journey to their exaggerated and distorted view of “personhood rights” today.
The sanctity of property rights for slaveholders was considered so paramount that it justified denying any recognition of basic rights to the persons who were enslaved. Similarly, among abortion prohibitionists the alleged full personhood of a fertilized ovum or pre-viable embryo/fetus existing as part of a pregnant person’s body is considered so paramount that the bodily autonomy and even physical safety of the person carrying the pregnancy can be disregarded.